Introducing Origin: Free Kontakt Instruments Built From My Modular Synths

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Hello Friends,

If you know me, you probably know I’m obsessed with modular synths.

They’re genuinely some of my favorite things on this planet. I can sit in front of a modular rig for hours, patching things together, recording weird sounds, and seeing where everything goes.

A lot of those experiments eventually find their way into my music.

Sometimes it’s a rhythmic pulse. Sometimes it’s a strange texture sitting way in the background. Other times I’ll record something that sounds completely broken, chop it up, process it, and suddenly it becomes one of my favorite sounds in a track.

That whole process is basically where Origin started.

Origin is a series of free Kontakt instruments we created through The Foundry by Rareform Audio, and the first three instruments are built entirely from modular synth and Eurorack source material.

The first release brings them together as Origin: Bundle v1, so I wanted to share a little more about where these sounds came from.

It All Started With My Modular Rig

Every sound in the first three Origin instruments started with performances on my own modular setup.

Everything was recorded at 96 kHz, and I wanted to capture the stuff I actually like about hardware.

That includes the imperfections.

Modular synths move. Things drift. There are artifacts, noise, instability, and little changes happening all the time.

For me, that’s a huge part of what makes them interesting.

So when we started turning these recordings into Kontakt instruments, I didn’t want to completely clean everything up and make the sounds feel sterile. The goal was to preserve that character, then chop, edit, process, and shape the recordings into something you could actually play.

That process eventually gave us three pretty different instruments.

Mod-Perc

Mod-Perc takes the modular setup in a rhythmic direction.

There are raw percussion sounds, warped loops, unstable pulses, and a bunch of rhythmic textures that have that slightly unpredictable modular quality to them.

A lot of these sounds started with voltage triggering transients or percussive sounds being pulled out of wavetables and other modular sources.

From there, we shaped them into patterns and playable sounds that are much easier to drop into an actual composition.

I really like using sounds like these underneath more traditional percussion. They can add movement and texture without necessarily becoming the main rhythmic element.

Or you can completely destroy them. That works too.

Mod-Keys

Mod-Keys is probably the least obvious thing you’d expect to come out of a modular rig.

It started with the idea of making a modular piano and eventually turned into four different playable voicings.

Some are cleaner and more intimate, while others move into a dreamier, more cinematic space.

We pushed the source material through granular processing, played with time and pitch, and added some low-fi character along the way.

The result still feels like a playable keyboard instrument, but there’s enough happening underneath it that it doesn’t feel like a traditional piano library.

Mod-Tones

Then there’s Mod-Tones, which gets into the side of modular synthesis I probably spend way too much time exploring.

Pads. Drones. Loops. Tonal textures. Weird evolving sounds.

This is where you can really hear the constant movement of the original Eurorack patches.

Voltages are moving through oscillators, filters, noise, and different modulation paths, so the source sounds naturally change over time rather than staying perfectly static.

We took those recordings and turned them into playable textures that can work underneath a score, become part of a sound-design layer, or just give you somewhere interesting to start writing.

Keeping Some of the Modular Feel

One thing I like about Origin is that we didn't completely separate the sounds from where they came from.

There are six effects built into the instruments: low-pass, hi-pass, distortion, delay, reverb, and tape. The idea was to keep the controls simple and hands-on so you can start shaping things quickly without getting buried in menus.

The entire bundle currently has 97 sound sources across the three Kontakt instruments.

But I think the more important part is that everything traces back to an actual performance and signal path.

There was a real patch behind it.

Where Origin Goes From Here

The funny thing is, I don’t necessarily know that Origin will always be about modular synths.

That’s where it started, and right now it makes perfect sense for the series.

But one of my favorite things about making sounds is when an idea starts going somewhere you didn’t originally plan.

Origin could eventually move into completely different instruments, recording techniques, or sound sources.

I actually like leaving that open.

The basic idea is simply to experiment with sounds we genuinely enjoy, turn the best stuff into useful instruments, and give them away.

Origin Is Completely Free

That brings me to probably the easiest part of this whole blog.

Origin is free.

No complicated explanation behind that. We wanted The Foundry to have a place where we could experiment and share some of the sounds we love working with, and Origin became that place.

Bundle v1 includes Mod-Perc, Mod-Keys, and Mod-Tones, and you can download all three through The Foundry.

You’ll need Kontakt 7.7.3 or newer to run them. Just keep in mind that they require the full version of Kontakt and won't run in the free Kontakt Player.

If you’re into modular synths, scoring, producing records, or just collecting weird sounds to mess around with, I hope you find something useful in there.

Have fun with them.

-Nathan.

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